ABSTRACT
We have proceeded upon the assumption that even before the social revolution—that is to say in the natural course of capitalist evolution—a concentration of all production into large-scale undertakings has taken place and that these undertakings are then nationalised. In the finishing industry there is indeed a strong tendency towards this form of concentration and the consequence is that side by side with it the importance of small-scale industry grows less and less. Nevertheless, the part which small-scale industry plays from an absolute point of view is everywhere still very considerable; its nationalisation leads, as our own experience shows, to its complete ruin—much to the injury of economic life generally. But if the nationalisation of production, even in the sphere of industry, meets with considerable difficulties, in agriculture these difficulties are simply insuperable. For nothing even comparable to the rapid rate of concentration in industry is to be observed in agriculture. There is only one country in which agriculture is organised upon an almost entirely capitalist basis, namely England; but the organisation here is the result of an agricultural development which took place in an epoch long passed and in which the conditions were fundamentally different from those ruling to-day. Yet even in England there are still perhaps half 85a million enterprises. A farm of even a hundred hectares is accounted quite considerable and no tendency towards further concentration can be observed. But on the European continent, and especially in Russia, the dominant organisation is the small-scale farm which relies upon the labour of the peasant and his family. Even in the United States—that country of huge-scale capitalism, of trusts and of millionaires—the small farm, in which hired labour is of subordinate importance, represents the prevailing form of agricultural production. It is true that in actual area the American farms surpass the peasant enterprises of Europe, but this follows from the extensive character of American agriculture.
